8-ball, Corner Pocket

At Nita's, Reyes spends about 20 minutes on the table before unscrewing his cue. He wipes his brow, then begins cataloging the aches and pains that are chipping away at his game. His eyes have gotten worse, he says. His elbows and shoulders hurt, and his belly makes it harder to stretch across the table. Everything has gotten worse since he quit smoking in 1997, he says. Some people in the Philippines say age has caught up with Reyes and robbed him of his magic touch. Reyes seems to agree. He thinks he'll play five more years, then retire, give lessons, make appearances or open his own hall. He knows other players are gaining on him, and that some may be, right now, better. He takes a shot, misses, and a grimace flashes across his face. "I know every angle," he says, "but sometimes I aim here"—he points to one side of the ball— "and I hit here," millimeters away. Puyat says Reyes "misses shots you'd never imagine his missing 10 years ago." Reyes shrugs, unmoved, but then, with rare emotion: "They can beat me now, but they can never achieve what I've achieved."

But just days before this catalogue of woes, Reyes was in Manila taking on Jeanette Lee, the most lucratively endorsed female in the game, nicknamed "The Black Widow" for her glamorous all-black outfits. The sellout crowd hooted and howled, thrilled to see both their hero and his striking challenger. The match started out close, but Reyes pulled away, winning nine of the last 10 games and the match, 13-5. After receiving his oversized check for $10,000 (Lee got $5,000), he was besieged by fans holding out T shirts, scraps of paper and pool cues for him to sign. Lee, downstairs at a reception, proclaimed: "He truly is the greatest player that ever lived."

When he started, Reyes stood on cases of Coke so he could reach the table. His family was poor. For a time, Reyes lived with an uncle who ran the Lucky 13 pool hall in Manila, occasionally sleeping on one of the tables, dreaming, he says, of how to handle the cue. When he was nine, he saw a man beat another man and get paid cash, and he saw his future. He played wherever, whenever, at the Lucky 13 or Rommel's in Manila, the Olympic or City Lanes in Angeles. Classmates, Chinese kids mostly, staked him in challenge matches. He attracted more backers, older guys who would whisk him from the school steps to billiards halls or girlie bars and watch him empty local and G.I. wallets until 5 a.m. School? "I went so I could sleep," he says. He dropped out when he was 15, a decision his parents accepted after he started adding his winnings to what his father earned as a vendor. At that stage, he didn't seek out top players because they were harder to beat; his ambition was to get paid, not to be the best. But to get paid the big money, he soon had to play the best.

There's a distinct Filipino style of billiards, says Helfert, "flowery," with a lot of movement in the backswing. More crucially, observes Billiards Digest editor Kirstin Pires: "The Filipinos are great gamblers. They always play their best when there is winner-take-all money." In tournaments, consolation money is still a payday. But when $10,000 or $20,000 is on the table, and only one man can take it home—that's why it's gambling—they find that additional motivation provides a little extra focus.

"No one in the world can stay with him hour after hour," says George Breedlove, a former top player. Backers still put up the money, Reyes still gets his cut, but the stakes have grown. Three years ago, legendary gambler and professional poker player T.A. Preston Jr., a.k.a. "Amarillo Slim," was in a Dallas pool hall. Slim didn't play much anymore. He was just watching, until a matchmaker told him Reyes would spot him 15-5 in one pocket, best of seven: each player could use one pocket on the table, and Reyes was claiming that in each game he'd sink 15 balls before Slim sank five. "I don't think that person lives," Slim said, taking the bet. He lost, returning the next day with "enough $100 bills to burn down the block." He lost again. He says he left $200,000 with Reyes and his backers. The next week, in California, "He wound up playing me 17-5. At 17-5, I beat him," Slim says (they ended even). "He's a great money player. I never saw him rattled, never saw him harass his opponent. Every time we played, he was a perfect gentleman. And every time, he did things I've never seen anyone do before."

At dinner, Reyes ignores his aches and pains and concentrates instead on the food—fish and rice, one light beer—the friends (all men) he's assembled around him, and, later at a karaoke bar, the lyrics to Before You Go by Matt Munro and Englebert Humperdink's The Way It Used to Be. That weekend, he took his bad eyes and bad elbows to the Tokyo-9 Ball Tournament and won the most lucrative event in the sport, pocketing about $160,000. The following weekend, he won again, this time in Warsaw, Poland. Still, he continues to say that his time at the top might be coming to an end, that he should prepare the country for the day he can no longer be the player they want, and maybe need him to be. During the late '80s and early '90s, when he went through a title drought, he felt the pressure. "Everyone in the Philippines expects me to win. They think I should never lose."

Pool is a game of positioning: you shoot to sink when you can and play safety when you must, and the hustle is always on. Reyes lives as he plays, staying home, safe, when he's not playing, decrying his sad slide, then going to Tokyo or Wales or Reno when there's money on the table. The last time we meet, at Nita's, he answers questions, poses for pictures, but he's clearly ready to do something else. What exactly, he doesn't know. Maybe wander around town, he says, and look for a game.